Exploring rivers and landscapes 

Class overview

Our planet is beautiful and dynamic, and much of earth’s dynamic nature is the result of the complex interaction between flowing rivers and estuaries, the sediment and land that they flow through, and the plant and animal life they support and are shaped by. In this course, students will learn the basics of how rivers and estuaries work and shape our landscapes through an integrated series of lectures, laboratory experiments, field investigations, coding exercises, and a research project. The first week of the course will focus on building knowledge about how rivers work, how to use particular laboratory equipment, accessing publicly available data, and coding in Python. The second week of the course will focus on (1) how global challenges such as climate change and human activity can impact natural processes and (2) the design, execution, and presentation of a small research project on this topic.